The Mesa Vista plate. Relief from Copernicus GLO-30; rivers and lakes from USGS NHD; watersheds from the USGS Watershed Boundary Dataset; roads and city limits from Census TIGER 2024.
Mostly cloudy
Chance of showers; warmer
Showers likely; cooler
Mostly sunny
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4.50 inches of rain fell in two days, the most for this week of the year since records began in 1968. The next wettest, 1.27 inches, fell in 2020.
Mesa Vista’s center stands about 5,760 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 4,850 ft to 9,210 ft, a difference of 4,360 ft: mountain country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Freel Peak, about 10,840 ft, 6 miles west-northwest.
The section below crosses 7 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 4×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Andesite, basalt. Age: Late Oligocene to Pleistocene, 2 to 24 million years old. About 8 mi of the line.
Granodiorite. Age: Permian to Tertiary, 2.6 to 260 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Schist, gneiss. Age: Paleoproterozoic to Cretaceous, 66 to 2,500 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Andesite. Age: Late Oligocene to Pleistocene, 2 to 24 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
From the USGS State Geologic Map Compilation (Horton and others, 2017), the states’ geologic maps joined at a common scale. 1 smaller unit along the line are not listed.
Heights from Copernicus GLO-90 (a surface model: it includes buildings and tree canopy); summits from USGS GNIS; rivers from USGS NHDPlus HR; rock from the USGS State Geologic Map Compilation.
A raindrop that lands in Mesa Vista reaches the Great Basin by way of Brockliss Slough and the Carson: about 140 river miles. The Great Basin has no outlet to the sea: the water leaves only by evaporating or soaking into the ground.
Lake on the way: Lahontan Reservoir.
65 miles of the trip are on the Carson.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Mesa Vista; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Mesa Vista has a dry-summer warm-summer continental climate. Summer afternoons average 80° in July; winter nights fall to about 18° in December. About 20 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Mesa Vista normally reaches 52° and falls to 24°. The record high is 69°, in 2016; the record low 2°, in 1985. The most rain on this date, 0.37 in, fell in 2025.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1968 at South Lake Tahoe Airport, 12 miles west-northwest, 500 ft higher. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
